The Deep History of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) –

Letters and Politics on KPFA with Mitch Jeserich:

KPFA Special – The History Behind The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam – Interview with Juan Cole

(Long excerpt of computer-generated transcript cleaned up by ChatGPT; caveat emptor):

Mitch Jeserich: Good day and welcome to Letters and Politics. I’m Mitch Jeserich.

Drink up in the light of the moon -— a moon that someday will look for us and not find us.”

That is one of the quatrains—in other words, a four-line poem—that is found in a new translation of the Rubaiyat, which is historically credited to Omar Khayyam, a renowned Persian astronomer and mathematician in the Middle Ages.

Once translated into English in the 19th century, the Rubaiyat would become one of the most read poems in the English-speaking world over the following century.

Today, we’re going to be in conversation about this history and about the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, including its historical influences—influences that span from pre-Islamic culture in the Middle East to the Mongolian Empire, and even to classical Chinese poetry. It’s a remarkable history that encompasses all of Asia.

My guest for this is Juan Cole. Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the translator of this book that we’re going to be talking about, called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian.

Juan Cole, it is my good pleasure to welcome you back to this radio program.

Juan Cole: Hi, Mitch. It’s great to be here.

For the earliest collection of verse attributed to Omar Khayyam see my The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian

Order from

Bloomsbury (IB Tauris)

or Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, who will ship it to you

or Barnes and Noble, who will ship it to you.

or Amazon

Mitch: I’m excited to be talking. I enjoyed very much preparing for our chat, especially when we got into this deep history of the influences behind the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

But before we get into the history, talk to me about the content. The content of these -— what -—some more than 150 small poems?

It’s full of praises of wine, praises of the moon, and philosophy. Basically, it urges one to experience this life in the day—now -— because it’s pretty doubtful that there is existence after life.

Tell me more about the content of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Juan Cole : The first thing to say is that the poetry seems remarkable, inasmuch as it’s coming out of a Muslim society. It’s very much unlike what you would expect from a Muslim poet.

As you say, it’s highly skeptical about the basic doctrines of the afterlife. That was one of the things that attracted me to try my hand at a retranslation.

In our day, when there are, I think, stereotypical and extreme caricatures of Muslims and Muslim culture, it’s important for us to understand the whole panoply of Muslim cultural production -— and the books and the poetry that are actually valued.

And the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam has been cultivated, quoted, and studied for a thousand years. So it’s something that seems pretty attractive to a Muslim audience -— or at least to some audiences within the Muslim world. And it casts a different light on the region.

Mitch: Here’s another quatrain. When I say quatrain, this is a four-line poem. The Persian version of quatrain is “ruba’i,” and Rubaiyat includes all — what—some 156, 157?

— Juan Cole In the manuscript I worked from, there were 158, but the first one, I think, was a piece of dissimulation. So I translated 157.

Mitch : So these 157 ruba’is in your book collectively become the Rubaiyat, and that’s how we get the name of this book.

This is Rubaiyat number 19. It says:

There’s a lot to unpack there, especially considering -— as you already said – it’s almost surprising today to think that this came out of the Islamic world.

Tell me about the world where the Rubaiyat comes from.

Juan Cole: That’s a controversy. Where exactly this poetry comes from has been argued about since the mid-19th century.

The claims were that this poetry was produced by the great astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam, who worked at the Seljuk imperial court.

However, historians became increasingly skeptical of this narrative because we can’t identify an early body of the poetry that seems to emanate from the astronomer.

The poetry appears here and there in manuscripts, sometimes attributed to Omar Khayyam, sometimes not -— sometimes attributed to other people.

And I argue it’s only in the 1400s that a convention developed where people gathered this poetry together, put it in the covers of one book, and attributed it to Omar Khayyam.

I think a lot of it was produced by various hands. Some of it maybe by artisans. Some of it has a very popular feel to it -— guys sitting around and joking with one another in the tavern. Other poems could emanate from a more courtly environment.

The real Omar Khayyam was rich. So I don’t think he was sitting around in rags at a tavern, the way the poetry sometimes speaks about.

I think a lot of it was produced in the Mongol period. And this is an extraordinary era in Iran and Central Asia and Iraq — – in Baghdad -— when the great Mongols moved west — they took Horace Greeley’s advice — from out near China and Korea and conquered very rapidly a great empire that stretched all the way across Central Asia -— what is now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and so forth -— into Iran and Iraq.

They threatened what is now Turkey, and made some forays down into India…

They established an empire -— and they were not Muslim.

Mitch They were Buddhist.

Juan Cole: They were Buddhists of a similar sort to the Tibetan Buddhists.

Mitch: “I mean, it was interesting when I was reading your epilogue, which is really riveting—and it’s not surprising, of course, that it happened this way—but it was still, sort of in my own American 21st-century way, surprising when you wrote: ‘Buddhist armies first invaded Persia.'”

Juan Cole: Yes, yes. Well, the Buddhists all along have had armies. The Dhammapada speaks of peace -— the Buddhist teaching -— but then so does the Gospel. And the Christians have been known to have armies too. So that’s a human condition.

The Muslim establishment consisted of a court -— a king—and then the king would have court clergy, ‘ulama, people who had been to seminary for purposes of law. A lot of law was derived from Islam, just as in medieval Europe, a lot of law was Catholic canon law.

Of course, they would guard orthodoxy. If there was a movement or a set of ideas of which they didn’t approve, they would go to the king and complain about it, and see if they couldn’t get troops sent to put it down or have the heretic arrested. That kind of thing maybe wasn’t quite as common in this area of the world as it was, say, in Inquisition Europe -— but those things did exist.

When the Mongols came in, that entire complex was swept away. There was no longer a connection between the court and the formal clergy -— the seminary-trained people -— because the Mongols were Buddhists initially, and they couldn’t have cared less about Muslim orthodoxy.

Even with the passage of decades, when a few of the high rulers started converting to Islam, I think they wore it lightly. And so it was an era in which, if you wanted to express a sentiment that was deprecated by the religious establishment, I think you could do so without fear of persecution.

Even then, of course, you had to deal with people around you, and some of them might be pretty stiff-necked. So you wouldn’t get in trouble for reading out such a poem, but you might not want to attribute it to yourself.

And so, I think they produced this kind of skeptical or libertine poetry and ascribed it to what the literary people call a “frame author.” It’s like in The Thousand and One Nights —- you know, all of those stories are attributed to the princess Scheherazade, who is under threat of being killed at the end of each day by the king. She extends her life every day by telling him a story with a cliffhanger, so he doesn’t execute her because he wants to hear the rest of the story. And after a while, he gives up on the idea of executing her because he likes her stories.

The stories in The Thousand and One Nights were produced in Cairo, Aleppo, Baghdad -— and many of them have an Indian origin. They’re folk literature from here and there. They’re not by a single author and certainly not by the princess
Scheherazade. But they were attributed to Scheherazade as a frame for the collection of these stories.

So I think the same kind of process operated with regard to these unconventional quatrains. They tended to be ascribed to Omar Khayyam. Ultimately, even the anonymous ones and the ones attributed to other authors -— some of them, by the way, women —- were gathered up and put under the name of Omar.

Mitch: The Mongolian Empire is important. I think it’s remembered in history for its brutality—especially in its invasions and in war. But the Mongolian Empire was also known, once it did conquer an area, for tolerance.

Juan Cole Sure. Again, the Buddhists weren’t interested in enforcing an orthodoxy. They did establish some Buddhist temples in Iran and Armenia, and there were lots of Buddhist monks -— bhikkhus —- who would wander around the country and beg. So Buddhism was supported by the early Mongol rulers of Iran.

Hulagu is said to have, once he took Baghdad, called a council of various religious leaders -— Christians and Jews and Muslims and smaller sects-— and taken their advice on religious policy as a group. So there was a certain amount of religious tolerance once they came to power.

Their conquests could be brutal. If they took a city, it was looted. But in other instances, if the city elders came out and sued for peace and said, “We’ll accept your rule, just don’t invade our city -— we’ll fork over taxes and so forth,” the Mongols didn’t go in.

There are cities like Tabriz, for instance, that were not invaded by the Mongols and which survived very nicely. It was the places that put up resistance that tended to get looted and damaged. Even then, the brutality of the Mongols has probably been somewhat exaggerated.

Mitch : You also write about the influence of Chinese Tang Dynasty poetry. This is classical Chinese poetry from the 7th century. And here’s one more quatrain I’d like to read. This is number 125:

I read that before I read your epilogue, and when I was reading it, I had just happened to have done my own personal deep dive into Tang Dynasty poetry last year. I got really into Li Bai, one of the most well-known classical Chinese poets, very much influenced by Tang Dynasty poetry from Taoism.

When I read quatrain 125, I couldn’t help but think about classical Chinese poetry.

Juan Cole : Of course, it’s a little speculative, because we don’t have historical sources that demonstrate that kind of influence. But the great Italian scholar of Persian, Alessandro Bausani, suggested that the Persian quatrain doesn’t seem to be ancient.

That is to say, there are stages of Persian, and it doesn’t seem to exist in Old Persian. He wondered whether it hadn’t come into Iran from China, because the quatrain is an established Chinese poetic form

Mitch: — from the Silk Road.

Juan Cole: Sure. It’s a Silk Road argument. He also thought that it could have been transmitted by other peoples. For instance, if the Turks adopted the quatrain from Chinese -— and then the Turks came to Iran, as they did (Turks and Mongols were both pastoralists who moved west) -— then the Turks could have communicated the form to the Iranians.

That’s with regard to the form of the quatrain.

Then the substance, as you say, is sometimes quite similar. There’s an emphasis in the quatrains on the ephemerality of life -— that life is fleeting, doesn’t last very long, and things around you are constantly changing. That’s a very Buddhist sentiment.

There’s even a point in the poetry where it says: “We don’t know even if we’ll be able to breathe out the breath that we just breathed in.” Life is so short and unpredictable.

A friend of mine who specializes in Buddhism pointed out to me that that’s in the Buddhist scriptures -— that sentiment, phrased pretty much that way.

So between the Silk Road and the Mongol Empire -— which, by the way, included both Iran and China. For a while there Iran was a province of the empire, and China was also a province of the same empire -— it seems at least plausible that some of these sentiments and ideas are pan-Asian. They’re being spread around all through the region.

Interestingly enough, the Chinese Tang Dynasty quatrain was also adopted in Japan -— but it was altered. It became a three-line poem, and we now know it as the haiku.

So it’s at least possible -— it’s in the realm of possibility -— that the Rubaiyat of Omar and the Japanese haiku have a common genealogy.

Mitch: Yeah, as you said—it’s speculative. But, you know, I couldn’t help but think of—and I think it’s an apocryphal story—the death of the Chinese poet Li Bai.

It goes: He was drunk. He praised the moon constantly in all of his poetry as well, and he was a drunkard. He was in a boat and saw the reflection of the moon in the water. He wanted to chase it. And so, he dived into the water to chase the moon -— the reflection of the moon -— and he ends up drowning because he was drunk.

I mean, you could have found that in the Rubaiyat, almost.

Juan Cole : You most certainly could . . .

Mitch: So that’s interesting. Again, you worked off the manuscript from about 1460 or so — Mahmud Yerbudaki? The manuscript still exists, then?

Juan Cole : It’s in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It’s the same one that Edward FitzGerald’s friend, Edward Cowell, found.

It had been collected during the Napoleonic Wars — there was kind of a geopolitical jockeying, and the French and the British both wanted Iran — which was an independent empire — to side with them. And so, the British sent, in 1810, Sir Gore Ouseley as ambassador to Iran. It was the first modern British embassy.

He brought along his brother William — I think William did some trade and so forth. So I think William probably was the one who bought this manuscript on the market. It was obviously an old manuscript. And Sir Gore Ouseley brought it back with him when his embassy ended and donated it to the library at Oxford.

I think Ouseley himself translated a few of these. He recognized that they were remarkable, and there was a journal of the Royal Asiatic Society at the time where they appeared.

But it was FitzGerald who worked most intensively with this text and translated a lot of the poetry. He self-published — he, being wealthy, could just pay to have the poetry put out. And, remarkably enough — and now I guess this sometimes happens with Amazon self-publishing — it went viral.

People found out about it — in Victorian England and then in the United States — and they fell in love with it. FitzGerald, I think, was a truly great poet, and it didn’t hurt that he had a way with words.

But then, the sentiments in the poetry also — I think they came along at a special time. You know, The Rubaiyat was translated around the same time as Darwin’s Origin of Species came out. And there were these big debates in the late 19th century about science and religion.

You know — the religious people had thought that the world was only 6,000 years old. And then archaeology revealed the dinosaurs. And then Darwin revealed that you didn’t really need an act of God to create species — that it was an ongoing biological process.

And so, because the Rubaiyat are skeptical about religious verities, and because they were attributed to a scientist —they really resonated.

Some of the Darwinian-minded in Victorian society especially liked them and promoted them — and they weren’t the only ones. I mean, people loved it. Even religious people often loved it.

But you know, there’s poetry in the book — one of them I translated:

This is a slam against astrology — and it’s pointing out that, since the frame author was supposed to be an astronomer, we know exactly where Mars is going to be next year at this time. But we don’t have any idea where any of us are going to be next year at this time.

Human beings are, you know, the most complex beings in the universe. And so, the idea that these regularly revolving rocks in the sky would dictate our fates is, from this scientific point of view, silly.

FitzGerald also translated that poem slightly differently. The original says the planets are a thousand times more helpless than we are. FitzGerald translated it as, “They roll along, as do you and I.” He made it equal — like we are just as helpless as the planets. But that’s not what the original said. The planets are a thousand times more helpless than we are.

So I think he was influenced by these ideas about “Orientals” being fatalistic and so forth. But the original actually shows human beings to be very dynamic in comparison with the regularities of natural law . . .

Mitch: Did you do this new translation of the Rubaiyat in part because our understanding of the Rubaiyat in the English language, anyway, is sort of stuck in the model that was given to us by Edward FitzGerald?

Juan Cole : To some extent. I mean, when I went to Iran in my early 20s, I bought this little edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I was working on Persian, and I compared some of the poetry to what’s in FitzGerald.

Of course, he made some of these poems famous — poems that had been just in manuscripts. And I think that had influence on the Iranian editors. But I looked over some of the poems and how FitzGerald had translated them, and you know, he played around with them quite a lot.

I don’t slam him for this — he was himself a creative person. He would put two poems together and mash them, take half of one and half of another. Or he would get away from the literal meaning of what the poem was saying to push his own agendas.

Sometimes he put in poetry by other authors — that we know are by other authors. So, the great Persian Sufi poet Attar — there’s a poem in there from him. And then there are a couple that we are very suspicious may be just FitzGerald’s own, since we haven’t been able to find anything exactly like them in any of the corpus of the original Persian.

So, I thought the Bodleian manuscript could be a template for an edition — a formal edition that’s much less playful and hybrid than the one FitzGerald did.

But the real reason I did this was, in part, the internet — Google Books and so forth. Google published the Bodleian edition, which had been printed in 1898 or something, but which was rare. You’d have to go to special collections and sit there with it. But there it was — I could have it on my phone.

I started working through it. I have a blog, and I put up some of my early attempts to translate it there. And people liked it. At that time, we had good blog metrics, and I could tell it was popular. One of the blog metrics showed me trending on social media having to do with lifestyle. Since I was a political blogger, I was kind of amazed. I went and looked, and it was the Rubaiyat.

So I thought there was some interest here. And people didn’t know about it anymore in the younger generation. As you said, from the time it started to become really popular in the late 19th century until the early ’70s, it was among the most quoted and most read poems in the English language. Bartlett’s Thesaurus and those kinds of anthologies were full of quotations from it.

But I think the movement against “dead white men,” and the desire to expand the range of literature — quite rightly so — caused high school teachers to drop it from the 1970s forward in favor of other kinds of literature.

So, when I meet someone who is my age or older and mention that I translated the Rubaiyat, they’ll start quoting FitzGerald’s translation. It was very common for people to memorize a lot of it. When I mentioned it to my agent, who’s in her 40s, she had no idea what I was talking about. And I found that was typical — younger people don’t know about it anymore.

It’s also true that, although FitzGerald’s poetry is great poetry, it’s now full of archaisms and maybe a little difficult sometimes. So I thought I would put it into contemporary American English and translate it not with meter and rhyme, but in free verse.

Although sometimes I played with a little bit of rhyme or half-rhyme, mostly it was free verse, and I kept the four-line stanza. That was something my editor insisted on, so it would read like poetry reads today — the sort that we enjoy from American poets — and to see if I couldn’t bring it to a new generation that was completely ignorant of it.

Mitch: Does the Yerbudaki script that you translated in Persian have its own rhythm? And is it the same Persian that’s still spoken today?

Juan: It’s not very far from the Persian spoken today. Sometimes it’s a little archaic, or the choice of words might be different now, but it’s in a simple kind of Persian. That was a feature of the quatrains of the Rubaiyat as a genre — it was beloved by common people, so it wasn’t full of highfalutin’ Arabic words.

I think most Iranians today could read the Yerbudaki edition and mostly understand it perfectly well. It’s like how, if you get back past about 1600, English becomes much more difficult. Of course, we can’t understand Chaucer in the original. But after 1700 or 1800, we can still read Pope and Dryden.

I think it’s the same with Persian. There was what was called “New Persian” that emerged after the Arab conquests of the 600s. By about the 800s, it had come into being. And the simpler form of New Persian really continues to this day.

People in Iran still cultivate the old poetry. It’s very common for people to memorize 10,000 poems. So yes, it has its own rhythm, and a lot of these poems are quite beautiful in the original — but it is accessible. . .

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